Special
section: Family Life
Todays family sets sail on stormy social waters, but the
church can help
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
Todays Catholic families are being battered by modern
societys successive waves of trivial values and violence, insidious
materialist preoccupations and blatant sex-as-a-social pastime ethos, vacuous
media and vulgar language, and the national emphasis on the individual over
family and community.
But just when families are most in danger of drowning, help is
finally at hand.
The slow-but-steady U.S.S. Church has lately been throwing life
preservers labeled Family Friendly to American parishes. Urged on
by examples from family ministers and bishops, youth ministers and publishers,
program developers and parish teams, the church as an entity has geared up for
action.
Life is tougher for families than 20 years ago, says
Winnie Honeywell, family life director for the Galveston-Houston diocese.
The context is so much more pressured and stressful. So many competing
forces.
The Internet is a scary, scary thing for parents. I could
name names and tell tales of good, solid families having a terrifically hard
time with preteens because of the Internet, Honeywell said.
American families can no longer count on the social supports that
once existed. Children come home to empty houses on empty streets where once,
even when mothers worked outside the home, there were relatives and neighbors
nearby. On top of this today are the tremendous pressures of the workplace. It
is an enormously difficult struggle.
To gain a sense of how well Catholic parishes are doing in helping
families cope, NCR talked to concerned and involved Catholics around the
country, seeking out clues to the best that is going on.
Look at todays Catholics, says pollster George Gallup,
and youre looking at America. Ask todays Catholic
families what they most want -- as the Christian Family Movement recently did
-- and they reply time.
Thats Honeywells take, too. Families today all
need time, she said. Its always at the top of the list --
more so than money. Time for family relationships, time for marriage
relationships.
To help with time management, she says, parishes ought to be
asking Catholic families, Are these the programs you need? Good
parishes, she said, try to make their programs family friendly.
Because time is so precious, Catholic families have to create church in their
home, racing against the clock.
There are forces working against this effort. Msgr. Arturo
Banuelas of St. Pius X Parish in El Paso, Texas, explained, Families are
struggling because of globalization, which competes with gospel values.
Globalization is telling families they need to be much more upwardly mobile. So
the people are struggling, trying to keep the family together while society
wants them to compartmentalize.
Meanwhile, from a Hispanic perspective, he said, the Hispanic
family has found in the church a place of tremendous support that
complements the home training in terms of their Catholic traditions and values,
of seeing life as sacred, seeing the values in everyday relationships, in
extended family relationships.
Its why, he said, even though were
on the border, we still have a somewhat lower rate of gangs than elsewhere. The
church is a strong supporter of families.
In the Catholic lexicon, family life and ministry
includes young singles, like those at St. Jude Church, Boca Raton, Fla., who
now have their own parish directory (the better to recognize and get to know
one another). Family life and ministry includes young adult parents, said Paul
Mach, youth and young adult minister at Holy Rosary Church, Redmond, Wash.
It includes toddlers in the Young Family Program at St.
Josephs Parish, Manistee, Mich., the parish lending library at St.
Georges Parish in Worcester, Mass., and programs for divorced and
separated persons in many parishes.
Family life and ministry includes the elderly in Holy Family
Parish in South Pasadena, Calif., which has a full-time gerontologist on staff.
They, too, are welcomed and drawn together to ensure that the Catholic parish
is intergenerational. It means the pregnant mom or the one who has had a
miscarriage being visited by the Elizabeth Ministers of St.
Cecilias Parish in Houston.
The social pressures on young families seem to worsen by the
decade.
In the nuclear family, says Honeywell, a major stress for parents
is that everything is competing for their children -- the media, school,
church, sports, the computer. Compared to many other religious groups, the
Catholic church is late into the fray.
Said Diana Gaillardetz, family life minister in St. Cecilias
Parish -- one of only two parishes in the Galveston-Houston diocese with
full-time family life ministers -- I was not raised Catholic but in
several Protestant denominations. I get frustrated because when I was a child
many of these new programs were already being offered by the
Protestant churches.
Thats how far behind we are as church, she said,
though were going in the right direction.
Learning from others
John Roberto of the Center for Ministry Development in Naugatuck,
Conn., said, The Protestant megachurches have responded to the needs. The
Catholic church has a good track record. It just hasnt been
widespread.
Increasingly, however, it is spreading widely indeed.
Catholics arent hesitant to learn from the rest -- the
singles directory in St. Judes, Boca Raton, was an idea adopted from the
synagogue down the road, said Fr. Mike Driscoll, the pastor.
The Catholic movement toward family gained its first major impetus
from the top in 1979. Thats when the bishops issued a Pastoral Plan
for Family Ministry, one of the 10 major topics of the Call to Action --
the 1976 U.S. bishops national town meeting -- explained Rick
McCord, executive director of the U.S. bishops Secretariat on the Family,
Laity, Women and Youth.
With their plan, The bishops for the first time took account
of the vastness and complexity of family life in developmental terms,
said McCord. They saw ministry to family as various life cycles and life
stages, not as a generic lump.
The 21st-century American Catholic family will be a multicultural,
multiethnic congregation of the faithful. Its trials, tribulations and
temptations mirror the difficulties of the U.S. family at large.
Catholic and other Christian churches, synagogues and mosques,
facing a rising river of meaningless materialistic values and empty, insidious,
sometimes evil forces, are desperately attempting to reinforce the levies with
sandbags of support, love, morality, meaning, community and -- most difficult
of all to sell in an affluent society -- sacrifice.
Dip into most dioceses and you come up with a variety of programs
-- and much variation in what constitutes family.
As Burlington, Vt., diocesan family life director Ruth
Charlesworth explains, its the traditional family and the single
family, single parents and single people -- more than in the past people are
choosing not to marry or find no one. Or there is the mother and daughter
living together after Father died, or fathers raising children, or aged
brothers and sisters living after maybe a spouse died.
Theyre all considered family and theyre all
looking toward the parish for help and guidance, she said. Parishes are
deciding what they need through their parish councils, said Charlesworth, and
the diocese responds, with marriage prep and marriage enrichment, and
Retrouvaille [a program for troubled marriages]; with parish workshops for
single/blended families, trying to provide ways and skills to bring children
into new relationships from previous relationships.
For the 21- to 40-year-old unmarrieds, theres Vermont
Catholic Singles --Some marriages come out of that, Charlesworth
said. The singles are active in the community teaching religious ed. and
mentoring, taking on big brother and big sister roles.
Giving parents a break
Family friendly at St. Josephs Parish in
Manistee, Mich., means giving parents a break. Director of religious formation
Shirley Skiera gets the word out with colorful Good Newsletters that
particularly highlight the Young Family Program after Sunday Mass, lunch
provided.
We keep telling the parents, Its fun for you,
not just the kids. To prove it, there are simultaneous programs
for children of various ages: nursery care (newborn to 2), sessions for
children from kindergarten through third grade, and supervised activities at
the Catholic Teen Center for children in fourth grade and above.
Parents, meanwhile, are having sessions on prayer, or on
death and dying. One day grandmas going to die, what are you going to do?
Or we bring in speakers to talk about what to do when kids are driving you
crazy, said Skiera.
Gaillardetz, family life minister at St. Cecilias, Houston,
understands young families struggles. She and her husband, Rick, are
employed outside the home while raising their four sons, 7-year-old twins,
Andrew and David, Brian, 4, and Gregory, 2.
In parish programs, she said, We say were rooted in a
faith that balances character and values -- values that are contrary to what is
taught and what the children see in society, consumerism. We say there is no
break between life and spirituality, and we want that to be the core.
Thats what we try to do in our home, she said,
but as both working parents its hard to influence. We try a lot of
rituals and traditions based on the liturgical cycle -- little children things
-- and try to do it in a way not just importing whats being done in the
church, but more truly family.
Instead of having an Advent wreath, which the church does, they
have a creche. Each time one of the boys does something good for a member of
the family, or another, they add another little piece of paper to the creche to
make it softer for the baby.
The dynamic in the parish, said Gaillardetz, has to do with
letting parents see the compassionate face of the church. Then
theyre going to start to feel a connection, and once the
connections made theres more of a community.
St. Cecelias is moving toward small Christian
communities by entering into Renew 2000, he said. For parishes like
mine -- and there are larger parishes -- its a community of
strangers. So the move is to more closely integrate the parishioners in
by bringing them together in small groups in the homes once a month and, using
the church or secular calendar highlight gatherings with meals, games, a
little catechesis and prayer.
Unless we find ways to help them feel included, said
Gaillardetz, theyre going to come to Mass on Sunday but with no
real heart to it. We stress that were not teaching anything new,
she said, nothing elaborate, just all learning to see God in lifes
ordinary experiences.
The word is getting around that Catholics are getting better at
family friendly outreach. Parishes are polishing their skills at
helping families help themselves and their children.
Societys harmful waves are still buffeting, but parishes and
families increasingly have the tools at hand to withstand the onslaught. The
big plus, of course, is that life preservers turn into soul preservers.
National Catholic Reporter, September 4,
1998
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